Last night I came upon The World Without Us, a book by Alan Weisman about what the world might be like if humanity suddenly ceased to exist (I think at the time I was showing a colleague the Wikipedia article about Puszcza Białowieska, a primeval forest on the border between Belarus and Poland). Weisman’s book looks fascinating, and hearing about it made me think of A Scientific Romance, a novel by Ronald Wright about a time traveller who journeys to a decayed and unpopulated London of the future. Here is an extract:
The Dartford bridge holds awful proof of age: the concrete leprous, pitted, whittled by wind, warty with cysts of rusting steel. Pelicans line the rods and girders like sailors on the rigging of a shattered windjammer. Cables have snapped and frayed, the roadway seems to hang by magic, and the magic’s wearing thin. Whole sections have gone from the raised approaches, leaving piers in the water like rows of prehistoric megaliths.
We made it our business to know what the centuries could do to corbel vaults and marble arches, to the grainite slabs of pharaohs’ tombs, to Roman concrete and Akkadian ziggurats. We knew the work of seepage on mud-brick, of termites on ironwood lintels, of acid rain on marble caryatids. But how much time would it take to make a modern structure look like this?
Time and heat. Your rat is gnawing. What happened here?
Warming, obviously, as many foresaw. But for the reasons they foresaw? Or something else, something for which we can’t be blamed: an asteroid smaking the planet in the chops; or the world relapsing like a malaria patient into its old sweats and chills?
I remember Skef saying — as an aside in his prehistory lectures — that the ice would rumble south again one day grind the spires of Cambridge into sand. But not to worry; we’d had a good long run since the glaciers stalled — a hundred centuries in which to tame our food, and tame ourselves, and invent civilization in half a dozen fertile spots from China to Peru — and he saw no reason why the fair weather shouldn’t last. […]
You can read parts of the novel on Google Books, here.
Thinking about things like this brought to mind various other things: The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (and also his Collapse, naturally), and The Road to Corlay, the first book in Richard Cowper’s White Bird of Kinship series. The rising and falling of civilisation has my brain abuzz.
